Friendster Founder Tells His Side of the Story, 10 Years After Facebook

Jonathan Abrams could have gone down as one of the world's most successful tech founders. Instead, he spends his time reading and sharing dozens of news stories each week about tech companies more successful than his own.

"Starting Nuzzel was about my own personal problem of having cool stuff that my friends are doing on Facebook and Twitter, but not keeping on top of it all," he told Mashable in an interview last month.

That sentiment is common enough. There are, after all, no shortage of people building and using social news readers for precisely that reason. But those people are not Jonathan Abrams. Twelve years ago, he founded Friendster and helped kick off the era of social networks. Ten years ago, he watched as Facebook launched and gradually became the market leader. A little more than one year ago, he released Nuzzel to make the most of the new crop of social networks that have surpassed his own.

His role at the new venture has effectively turned him into an unofficial media critic. "Right now, running Nuzzel, I read a lot of online news," he says. "I see stuff everyday that isn't true." This extends to stories written over the years about the reasons for Friendster's launch and eventual decline.

"There was the idea that I started Friendster to meet girls, to get dates, which was never true," he says. "There was the idea that Friendster's problem was fake profiles."

The real story, as he tells it, is more complicated and full of even more missed opportunities than you might assume for a tech company that missed one of the biggest opportunities in recent memory.

Friendster's website in late 2004, a few months after Facebook launched.

Image: Internet Archive

Abrams doesn't remember the exact moment he heard about Facebook, but it wasn't long after it launched in February 2004.

Not quite two years old then, Friendster had already come up against many new competitors and clones. Michael Birch, best known for selling Bebo to AOL and later buying it back, launched Ringo.com three days after hearing about Friendster, later describing it as "a copycat site of Friendster." Google launched Orkut, a failed early attempt at a social network, in January 2004 after attempting a Friendster acquisition. Even one of Friendster's investors, future Zynga founder Mark Pincus, launched a social networking competitor in 2003 called Tribe.net.

If all that wasn't enough, there was MySpace, which was founded in late 2003. According to Abrams, the team at MySpace would spam Friendster's message boards, trying to poach users.

"It was a really weird time. Friendster at the time was still a very small company," he says. "We viewed ourselves as the David, not the Goliath. There were the Yahoos and the AOLs and we were this tiny, little startup. But the moment Friendster got the publicity, people started to copy it. Of course we were aware of all of them."

Even with all that competition, Abrams recognized early on that Facebook might pose a unique threat. On Friendster, users could set up profiles, connect with friends and family, search for new contacts (and, yes, potential dates) based on the people you were already connected to and interact with people on the social network through messages and groups. It was essentially a more pared down version of Facebook and the latter had the added benefit of quickly gaining popularity among college students.

In response, Abrams claims now that he suggested Friendster should launch a "Friendster College" initiative to establish itself on 20 college campuses before Facebook could scale to that level. He says he had wanted to build the equivalent of a news feed even before Facebook launched, and that he had plans to build tools on top of the "Friendster social graph," including one for sharing music playlists.

In short, he wanted to take Friendster and evolve it to become what we now know as Facebook.

"The problem," he says, "was that Friendster was having a lot of technology problems." Friendster had raised an additional $13 million in funding in 2003 and, according to Abrams, investors weren't focused on patching up the service properly, let alone responding to the threats posed by upstarts like Facebook.

"The fact that we didn't launch those products was a problem, but even more fundamentally, people could barely log into the website for two years," he says. "By the time Facebook and MySpace was doing those things, Friendster had lost a lot of market share in the U.S. for stability issues."

In April 2004, two months after Facebook launched, Friendster's board replaced Abrams as CEO and moved him in the mostly powerless chairman role.

"I'm not very close to Mark Zuckerberg," Abrams says, in a huge understatement. "But we've met."

That meeting, according to Abrams, occurred later in 2004 while he was chairman of Friendster and Scott Sassa was its president and CEO. Friendster wanted to buy Facebook. Abrams declined to provide a precise acquisition offer, but suggested it wasn't large enough to interest Zuckerberg and his team at the time.

"I never thought he would sell to Friendster, but one of the CEOs was interested in trying to pursue it," Abrams says, referring to Sassa.

Some six years later, the two businesses entered into an acquisition agreement of a different sort: Facebook bought Friendster's entire portfolio of social networking patents for a reported $40 million. By this time, Facebook was on the cusp of hitting 500 million users worldwide, and Friendster had drifted into irrelevance — at least in the western hemisphere.

Like minidisc players and QR codes, Friendster made its last stand in Asia. The social network was acquired in 2009 — not by "goliaths" like Yahoo or AOL, or Google, which had offered to buy it years earlier — by MOL Global, an online payments provider based in Malaysia. Friendster had 115 million members at the time of the acquisition, the vast majority of which (more than 75 million) lived in Asia.

A little more than a year later, Friendster started again from scratch, deleting its users' data and pivoting to become a gaming service. Friendster.com still exists today, though it bares little resemblance to the Friendster of old. It's currently ranked as the 20,815th most popular site in the world, according to data from Alexa, with most of its visitors coming from India, Malaysia and the Philippines. Facebook is the second most popular site the world.

It takes some effort to find references to Friendster today on Nuzzel's website, despite the fact that the startup has several former Friendster employees on staff. The word isn't listed on the main page of the beta site; it first appears below the fold on the About page as part of Abrams' bio, sandwiched between two other startups he's worked on.

Abrams is still proud of Friendster, but he prefers not to talk about those days, noting in the first of several curt email exchanges that he doesn't have time for "old stuff about Friendster."

Shortly after leaving the social network he founded in 2005, Abrams launched Socializr, an online tool for sharing events, which later laid off its team in 2009 and was acquired the following year. He is the cofounder of Founders Den, which provides shared office space, and occasionally does some angel investing. He even co-owns a nightclub in San Francisco called Slide, though he says he doesn't go out to nightclubs much anymore for the same reason he doesn't use Snapchat.

"Part of it is where I'm at with my personal life right now. I'm not single, I'm a parent. I'm not using Tinder and Snapchat; I'm just not there in my life," he says. "When I started Friendster 11 years ago, I was not in my 20s, but in my 30s, and I was single and it was a different stage for me."

Abrams does have accounts on Facebook and Twitter, though he prefers the latter and rarely uses either for personal purposes. Mostly he prefers email.

Friendster may be relegated to punchline-status these days, but Abrams argues the startup had a positive impact on his life overall.

"Whenever you step out and do something, you are going to get both positive and negative feedback. That's just what happens when you create things," he says. "Absolutely there are people who have criticized me for things involving Friendster — sometimes things that are not true. But overall, most of the legacy of Friendster is pretty positive. And there are a lot of connections and relationships that I have that may have been started because of Friendster."

For now, Abrams continues to work on developing Nuzzel and suggests the news reader may finally come out of beta in the near future. As it so happens, though, Facebook just launched a social news reader of its own. Ten years later, Abrams may end up competing with Facebook all over again.

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